X fanatic and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it unattainable to find out whether or not social media posts are actually written by people, he posted.
The belief got here whereas studying (and sharing) some posts from the r/Claudecode subreddit, which have been praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI launched the software program programming service that takes on Anthropic’s Claude Code in Might.
These days, that subreddit has been so crammed with posts from self-proclaimed Code customers asserting that they moved to Codex that one Reddit person even joked: “Is it attainable to change to codex with out posting a subject on Reddit?”
This left Altman questioning what number of of these posts have been from actual people. “I’ve had the strangest expertise studying this: I assume it’s all pretend/bots, regardless that on this case I do know codex progress is absolutely robust and the development right here is actual,” he confessed on X.
He then live-analyzed his reasoning. “I believe there are a bunch of issues happening: actual individuals have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extraordinarily On-line crowd drifts collectively in very correlated methods, the hype cycle has a really ‘it’s so over/we’re so again’ extremism, optimization stress from social platforms on juicing engagement and the associated method that creator monetization works, different corporations have astroturfed us so i’m additional delicate to it, and a bunch extra (together with most likely some bots).”
To decode that slightly, he’s accusing people of beginning to sound like LLMs, regardless that LLMs — spearheaded by OpenAI — have been actually invented to imitate human communication, proper right down to the em sprint. And OpenAI’s fashions positively educated on Reddit, the place Altman was a board member by 2022, and was disclosed as a big shareholder throughout the firm’s IPO final 12 months.
He makes a sound level that fandoms, led by extraordinarily, always-on social media customers, do are likely to behave in odd methods. Many teams can devolve into hatefests if overrun by these venting frustrations to their brethren.
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Sam additionally throws a dig on the incentives when social media websites and creators depend on engagement to earn money. Honest sufficient.
However then Altman confesses that one of many causes he thinks the pro-OpenAI posts on this subreddit is likely to be bots is as a result of OpenAI has additionally been “astroturfed.” That sometimes entails posts by individuals or bots paid for by the competitor, or paid by some third-degree contractor, giving the competitor believable deniability.
We now have no proof of astroturfing (although it’s attainable). However we did see how OpenAI subreddits turned on the corporate after it launched GPT 5.0. As a substitute of waves of reward from the devoted over the brand new mannequin, many indignant posts have been voted up. Folks took to Reddit and X to complain about every thing from GPT’s character to the way it burned by credit with out ending duties.
A day after the bumpy launch, Altman did a Reddit ask-me-anything session on r/GPT during which he confessed to rollout points and promised modifications. The GPT subreddit has by no means totally recovered its earlier degree of affection, with customers nonetheless posting usually on how a lot they dislike the modifications with GPT 5.0. Are they human? Or are they, as Altman appears to indicate, pretend ultimately?
Altman surmises, “The web impact is one way or the other AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very pretend in a method it actually didn’t a 12 months or two in the past.”
If that’s true, who’s fault is it? GPT has led fashions to turn out to be so good at writing, that LLMs have turn out to be a plague not simply to social media websites (which have at all times had a bot downside) however to varsities, journalism, and the courts.
Whereas we don’t know what number of Reddit posts are written by bots, or are fictional accounts by people utilizing LLMs, it’s possible a considerable quantity. Knowledge safety firm Imperva reported that over half of all web site visitors in 2024 was non-human, largely as a consequence of LLMs. X’s personal bot Grok says: “The precise numbers aren’t public, however 2024 estimates recommend lots of of tens of millions of bots on X.”
A number of cynics have urged that Altman’s lament was his first forays into advertising OpenAI’s rumored social media platform. In April, the Verge reported that such a venture to tackle X and Fb was on the earliest levels. This product could or could not exist. Altman could or could not have had ulterior motives for suggesting that social media is simply too pretend today.
However motives apart, if OpenAI is planning a social community, what are the chances that it will be a bot-free zone? And, humorous sufficient, if it did the reverse and banned people, the outcomes possible wouldn’t be completely different. Not solely do LLMs nonetheless hallucinate details, however when researchers on the College of Amsterdam constructed a social community composed completely of bots, they discovered that the bots quickly fashioned cliques and echo chambers for themselves, too.
